Lisa Desjardins, Geoff Bennett, and Paul Offitt on RFK Jr.

On the PBS NewsHour last night, Lisa Desjardins examined Robert F. Kennedy’s claims about vaccinations and COVID-19, and Geoff Bennett interviewed Dr. Paul Offitt, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Just one excerpt, with a story that‘s new to me:

Bennett: You also point to one episode where he spoke out against the measles vaccine. What was the impact of that?

Offitt: In Samoa [in 2018], there were two children that died immediately following receipt of a measles vaccine. And the way it works into Samoa is, they have a MMR vaccine in powdered form. It needs to be diluted in water. Two nurses made a mistake. Instead of diluting it in water, they diluted it in a muscle relaxant. Those children stopped breathing and died immediately. Now, very quickly, within two weeks, it was realized what that mistake was. It was a nursing error.

But, nonetheless, RFK Jr. seized on that. He flooded Facebook with information that measles vaccine is killing children in Samoa. He went to Samoa. He met with anti-vaccine activists. He met with senior officials in Samoa and kept the drumbeat alive that measles vaccine was killing children in Samoa. As a consequence, vaccination rates fell from 70 percent to 30 percent. And between September and December of 2019, there was a massive measles epidemic.

In this island nation of 200,000 people, there were 57,000 cases of measles and 83 deaths. Most of those deaths were in children less than four years of age. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had everything to do with that. And that shows you how disinformation can kill.

Here’s a BBC report on what happened in Samoa.

This NewsHour segment should be shared widely. I’m sharing it with the tens of people who are likely to see this post.

Sardines, paste, pasta

Here’s a recipe for sardine paste. Paste? As Steven points out, pâté would sound far more appetizing. Thanks, Steven.

And here’s a description of Nigella Lawson’s sardines and spaghetti, heralded as “the dish of summer.”

I know that when it comes to cooking, there is very little that’s new under the sun. In 2015 The Crow wrote about a then-forty-year-old memory of sardines and cavatini. And shortly thereafter, Chris at Dreamers Rise left a comment on this blog about making sardines with linguine. Which in turn inspired me to try sardines with capellini. Mangia.

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All OCA sardines posts (Pinboard)

[The article about the Lawson recipe describes a “tomatoey” dish, but there are no tomatoes in the recipe.]

Elements of Style reviewed

“At its best when it limns the gap between the seemingly straightforward advice of Strunk and White (use active voice, avoid needless words) with [and?] the messiness of the ensemble’s lived experiences”: from a Chicago Reader review of the Neo-Futurist stage show Elements of Style.

I can’t claim to understand what this show is about, but I at least know it’s there.

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The Elements on the stage : All OCA Strunk and White posts (Pinboard)

Ikea phone index-card stand

[Click for a larger stand.]

When we were out in Los Angeles for a few days, our daughter Rachel gave us each an Ikea phone stand. A nifty gift for those who have traveled with just a backpack apiece.

There’s just one problem with these stands: they don’t accommodate a phone in a case, at least not our phones. But the stands make great index-card holders. I’m very happy to have repurposed another household item for stationery purposes.

Thank you, Rachel.

More repurposing
Cooling rack : Dish drainer : Doorstop : Shaving-cream caps : Tea tin : More tea tins : Yogurt jar

Unchained medley

We were driving past an Applebee’s, so I gave out with a faux-spirited rendition of the Cheers theme, a song not long ago in use in the chain’s television commercials, ending with “You wanna go where everybody knows your name.”

And Elaine sang in reply, “I wanna be where the people are.”

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Coming soon

From The New York Times:

Former President Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday that he recently received a so-called target letter from the special counsel Jack Smith in connection with the criminal investigation into his efforts to hold onto power after he lost the 2020 election, a sign that he is likely to be indicted in the case.

It would be the second time Mr. Smith has notified Mr. Trump that he is a target in a federal investigation. The first, in June, was in connection to the investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of national defense material after he left office and his alleged obstruction of efforts to retrieve it.

“The lower fishbody”

A dead mermaid washes up on the shore of a public beach, and a town responds.

Steven Millhauser, “Mermaid Fever,” in Voices in the Night (2015).

And suddently I’m seeing mermaids (and mermen): in the stylish low-budget movie Night Tide, with Dennis Hopper, in the Route 66 episode “The Cruelest Sea of All,” in the Netflix series Merpeople. And my young granddaughters are all in the grip of mermaid fever. The kids these days.

You can read “Mermaid Fever” at Harper’s.

Thanks, Chris, for recommending Night Tide.

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Heather Cox Richardson today

In the latest installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson writes about what would likely happen in a second Trump term. Short answer: a dictatorship.

Hodwy

I for one hope that hodwy acquires some currency.

Example: “Hodwy do?” “Oh, we did pretty good.”

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Robert, Jack and Jill, and others

Annye C. Anderson, “Mrs. Anderson” to all, is Robert Johnson’s stepsister. She was a toddler when Brother Robert, as she calls him, was a young man. She is now in her later nineties, Here are details that I culled from Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, by Mrs. Anderson with Preston Lauterbach (New York: Hachette, 2020):

Robert Johnson played harmonica and piano in addition to guitar. He yodeled too. The pinstripe suit in the famous photograph was made by Eggleston the Tailor or Hooks Brothers, both on Beale Street. (At different points the memoir identifies each clothier as the maker.) While it’s been said that Johnson kept ideas for songs in a notebook, Mrs. Anderson says that she never saw one.

Robert Johnson liked fried pumpkin, spaghetti (“black folks’ spaghetti,” Mrs. Anderson calls it), Bull Durham “roll ’ems,” and Dixie Peach pomade. He paid close attention to westerns, Joe Louis, and Negro League baseball. He would ask a listener, “What’s your pleasure?”

“He didn’t get his abilities from God or the Devil,” Mrs. Anderson writes. “He made himself.”

Titles of songs (in addition to those on record) and rhymes that Johnson played, sang, recited, as Mrs. Anderson recalls them:

44 Blues : 1937 Waters (to the tune of Didn’t It Rain) : Annie Laurie : Auld Lang Syne : Beale Street Blues : Careless Love : Casey Jones : Coon Shine Baby : Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? : Dry Bones : Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush : Humpty Dumpty : Jack and Jill : John Brown’s Body : John Henry : Joshua Fit the Battle : Let Yourself Go (accompanying his stepsister, after seeing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Follow the Fleet ) : Little Boy Blue : Little Sally Walker : Loch Lomond : Mary Don’t You Weep : Mary Had a Little Lamb : Memphis Blues : Mr. Froggie Went to Courting : My Bonnie : Pennies from Heaven : Poor Boy a Long Way from Home : Precious Lord (Take My Hand) : Salty Dog Blues : She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain : Sittin’ on Top of the World : St. James Infirmary : St. Louis Blues : Swing Low Sweet Chariot : Take a Little Walk with Me : TB Blues : Tell Me Mama : That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine : Trouble in Mind : Waiting for a Train (“Jimmie Rodgers was his favorite”) : We Go Lokey, Lokey, Lokey : When They Ring Them Golden Bells

Brother Robert is a powerful rebuttal to the mythologizing that made Robert Johnson into a rootless, doomed existentialist. And it’s a lacerating depiction of the machinations of two white men — Mack McCormick and Steve LaVere — in their dealings with Mrs. Anderson’s half-sisters, Bessie Hines and Carrie Spencer Thompson.

The one thing this book is missing: a family tree, though I wouldn’t want to be the person making it.

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All OCA Robert Johnson posts (Pinboard)